The White iPhone: How It's Different

After 10 long months the white iPhone 4 is finally here and it's, well, a white iPhone 4. For all the hoopla surrounding it, it really is just a change of color, the same 10-month-old iPhone dressed up in a new party outfit. Since there are no differences in hardware or software between this and the device released so long ago in black, we are not going to put it through a whole new review. For an in-depth look at the iPhone 4's hardware and features, click over to our original review of the Apple iPhone 4 on AT&T ($199-$699, 4.5 stars) or the Apple iPhone 4 on Verizon Wireless ($199-$699, 4 stars). Here we're going to outline the few minor differences between the black and white versions of the popular cell phone.

For starters, the iPhone 4 does come in a rather dazzling shade of white. Perhaps that's the result of being so familiar with it in black, but it looks goodevery bit as clean and sleek as its black counterpart. One of my colleagues was even stopped a number of times in a coffee shop while testing the phone out in the wild, by people who just wanted to look at it. And it's not only the exterior of the phone that is white. In typical Apple attention to detail, a close look at both the connection dock on the bottom of the phone as well as the headphone jack at the top reveal that any visible part of the phone that isn't clear or aluminum is also coated in white.

Other than that, there's just one perceptible difference between the two phones. On the white iPhone 4, a black proximity sensor is visible slightly above the phone's speaker. It's also there on the black model, but it's essentially undetectable unless you're looking closely, and even then you have to be in very good lighting to see it.

All that brings us to the final point: size. The white iPhone 4 and the black iPhone 4 are effectively the same size. We took a caliper to both phones and measured only the slightest of differencesless than .02mm. This is not the sort of difference you can perceive by looking at or handling the phones. More importantly, it is not the sort of difference that has any bearing on the type of protective case you can use, so it really isn't an issue at all.

When it comes down to it, it's all about aesthetics. If you know you want to buy an iPhone 4, you have just two questions to ask yourself: AT&T or Verizon, and black or white?

Alex Colon is the managing editor of PCMag's consumer electronics team. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in English Writing and Literature from Pace University and got his start editing books before deciding technology would probably be a lot more fun.
Though he does the majority of his reading and writing on various digital displays, Alex still loves to sit down and read a good, old-fashioned, paper and ink book in his free time. (Not that there's anything wrong with ebook readers.)
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